Tag: Lord Freud

From Farage to Freud: How the Cultural Marxists Are Murdering Our Language

The other day on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, I made a point which unfortunately went right over the heads of my booing audience. It had to do with the way lefties like my fellow panelists Chuka Umunna MP and TUC leader Frances O’Grady too often choose to misrepresent the meaning of perfectly harmless words and language for nefarious political ends.

We were discussing Labour’s confected furore over Lord Freud’s remarks on the disabled. As is now abundantly clear to anyone even halfway acquainted with the background to the story – the fact, for example, that his comments were addressed sympathetically to the father of a severely disabled daughter – Lord Freud’s intentions and meaning were unimpeachably honourable and decent.

So instead his critics resorted to that well-tested lefty fallback position: distortion and misrepresentation. In this case, Lord Freud’s remarks about disabled people being thought by employers to be not “worth the full wage” were twisted so as to mean that he thought disabled people were “worthless.”

This is a weasel trick and when Labour MP Chuka Umunna tried it on Any Questions, I called him out on it. Umunna has his faults but unutterable stupidity is not one of them. Suppose, I put it to him, that he had heard someone in the pub after a rugger match boasting about having “murdered” the opposition. Would he call the police?

Of course he wouldn’t because like anyone born into our richly allusive English-speaking culture he would have understood that our language depends as much on tone and context as it does on the words themselves. That verb “murder” is a perfect example of this. Sometimes, it can indeed mean literally “kill”. But on many other occasions it can mean something innocuous like desperation for a drink (“I could murder a pint”) or abject defeat in a board game (“he murdered me at Scrabble”).

And the amazing thing is that despite the fact that depressingly large sections of our population have low IQs, are functionally illiterate, and are almost totally uneducated thanks to our dumbed-down education system, even the most unutterable thickos among us are yet capable of grasping these semantic nuances – even though they wouldn’t know what a “semantic nuance” was if it bit them on the arse.

So if even the thickest of thick native English speakers can understand basic concepts like the fact that even though “worth less” and “worthless” sound the same but actually mean something different – why can’t a bright, articulate, Manchester- and Burgundy-University-educated, City lawyer like Chuka Umunna?

The answer, of course, is that it suits him not to – in much the same way it suited Nigel Farage’s various lefty-feminist critics not to at the time of his supposedly contentious remarks earlier this year about women in the City.

What Farage said, you may remember, was this:

“And if a woman has a client base, has a child and takes two or three years off work, she is worth far less to the employer when she comes back than when she went away because her client base will not have stuck rigidly to her.”

This is a fairly straightforward economic point which, I’m quite sure, any City employer would tell you (albeit guardedly, lest they seem in any way “discriminatory”) is no more than the ground truth.

Yet the truth was no defence for the likes of Labour MPs such as Harriet Harman who naturally piled in to accuse Farage of saying something he had never actually said: that female employees are, to some degree, “worthless.”

Of course I understand why the Harmans and the Umunnas of the world play this game: it’s a useful way of circumventing the awkward fact that the left rarely has any useful arguments.

But what astonishes me is our cultural tolerance for it…

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Related posts:

  1. How the malign, totalitarian left played the ‘disability’ card to brand an innocent man a thought criminal
  2. The fake disabled are crippling our economy
  3. Treating Islam with special reverence is cultural suicide and just plain wrong
  4. If we’re going to rage against cultural atrocities, let’s make sure we target the right ones

 

How the Malign, Totalitarian Left Played the ‘Disability’ Card to Brand an Innocent Man a Thought Criminal

Another day, another “full and unreserved apology”  forced on someone in the public eye by the leftist Offence Police.

This time the mea maxima culpa comes from a minor government minister called Lord Freud who, apparently, has been caught out saying something truly, dreadfully, almost unforgiveably evil about disabled people.

His statement says:

“I would like to offer a full and unreserved apology. I was foolish to accept the premise of the question. To be clear, all disabled people should be paid at least the minimum wage, without exception, and I accept that it is offensive to suggest anything else. I care passionately about disabled people. I am proud to have played a full part in a government that is fully committed to helping disabled people overcome the many barriers they face in finding employment. I am profoundly sorry for any offence I have caused to any disabled people.”

We all care about the disabled. But “passionately?”

This is no ordinary apology.

It’s redolent of the kind of thing you might write with a knife held to your throat by Islamic State; the sort of confession you’d make after months of reeducation in a North Korean POW camp; the stuff you might say at a Kim Jong Un show trial, shortly before being thrown into a cage of fifty starving dogs. What it most definitely isn’t is the language you’d expect any person to have to use anywhere outside a totalitarian state. It’s just not how real people talk. Not only is it too strained and hyperbolic but it’s intellectually dishonest and politically extreme.

Why, for example, is it “offensive” to the point of total unacceptability to argue that there are some occasions where it makes sense to pay disabled people below the minimum wage?

Surely there are times when it is both economically sensible and compassionate?

Sam Bowman makes a good case here:

Many severely disabled people who would like to work thus can not do so. Markets are amoral. If a severely disabled person cannot produce more than the minimum wage’s worth of work, no employer will be able to profitably employ him. Some generous ones might do so at a loss, but we cannot assume that there will be enough of them.

What Bowman is restating here is the point that Lord Freud was trying to make at a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference, where his remarks were recorded by a Labour party activist and then used by Labour leader Ed Miliband in parliament yesterday to ambush David Cameron.

Lord Freud’s point was a perfectly reasonable, caring and practical one: how do you best incentivise employers to take on disabled people who want to work but whose productivity rate may not be the equal of able-bodied employees?

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Related posts:

  1. The fake disabled are crippling our economy
  2. The officers who played fireball hockey with me have been scandalously betrayed
  3. How the TUC’s day of innocent family fun was destroyed by evil, fascist media
  4. Wind farms: even worse than we thought…

3 thoughts on “How the malign, totalitarian left played the ‘disability’ card to brand an innocent man a thought criminal”

  1. evancb says:18th October 2014 at 12:38 amJames, you describe yourself as a ‘libertarian,’ but you are also over 15-years old. How does that work?
  2. evancb says:18th October 2014 at 12:40 amWhat a carcrash

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xHTRXi6oXY

  3. evancb says:18th October 2014 at 12:42 amJesus. I have only just discovered that you exist. But it really is like a masterclass in humiliating yourself in public. You’re like a male version of Kinga Karolczak.

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